Cooking the diaspora

Indian food abroad has made way for the cultural contexts of the foreign land it is located in. Vikram Doctor speaks to Madhur Jaffrey on her attempt to chronicle the journey Calcutta say challat jahhaj, Panwariya dheeray chalo (The ship is sailing from Calcutta, O boatman go slowly)

The words are from a song sung by poor labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar as they sailed in the 19th century to the other side of the world, to work as indentured labour in the sugar cane fields of Guyana and Trinidad. At a time when modern migrants from North India are a contentious subject again, its worth remembering how old their story is. From 1848 onwards recruiters from Calcutta, known as 'coolie-catchers', persuaded thousands of dirt poor mostly Bhojpuri speaking peasants to sign contracts that were only marginally better than slavery. For two five year terms they would labour for absolutely minimum salaries with the promise of free passage home if they wanted it. It was hardly the most generous of offers, but it did have one big benefit: then as now, anything was better than staying in the unchanging caste ridden misery at home.

Moveable Feast The story of these migrants is little acknowledged today. If we think of them at all, its more for their descendants, the members of the Great Indian Diaspora, who we're happy to pursue with our PIO cards, Pravasi Bharati days, Resurgent India bonds and TV crews when their most successful members make ceremonial visits home to see the villages from where their forebears fled (and probably to thank them heartily for doing so, considering how little has changed). Of the actual lives of these forebears, the stories of their journeys, of what awaited them at the other end, of how they survived, of what links they did and didn't retain with India and where the diaspora is today, comparatively little has been written, especially compared to other diasporas like the Jewish or African ones, which are well served by books, studies and films. This is starting to change. VS.Naipaul has been joined by a brash new brigade of young diasporic writers. Academics like Vijay Prashad are exploring the archives - his The Karma Of Brown Folk has fascinating historical material on early 19th century migrants to the US. And now quite literally to add some spice to these efforts comes one of the doyennes of the diaspora herself, Madhur Jaffrey with a fascinating new book on the cooking of the desi diaspora. Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible takes on the journey of Indian food from the curries of British planters and the scant rations of those Bhojpuri labourers to the time when chicken tikka masala can be claimed as Britain's national dish and non-Indian Trinidadians riot against an Indian dominated ministry under the slogan 'We Don't Want No Roti Government.' (The use of Indian food as an epithet for the community is very common. In South Africa recently a Zulu song that caused controversy by attacking Indians, had lines accusing South African politicians of indulging them because their "buds are watering for roti and betelnuts")

Authoring Change For Jaffrey the book has been long in the making. "I've been collecting recipes for years as I travelled around the world," she tells us, speaking from her home in New York. "It was fascinating for me to see the way Indian recipes had transformed themselves in other countries and how they had in turn transformed the food of those countries," she says. It was a process she herself had been part of in one country; she played a vital role in popularising and changing the profile of Indian food in the UK with her cookbooks and TV shows. Jaffrey brings out the diversity of the diaspora. Apart from those Bhojpuri farmers sailing from Calcutta there were poor Tamilians (and other South Indians) sailing from Madras to Malaysia, Mauritius or South Africa, Gujarati traders journeying from Kutch to Kenya, Chettiar moneylenders to Burma, Sikh farmers leaving the Punjab for California and lets not forget the more recent journeys, like the second dispersal of Indians expelled from East African, or the most recent professional migrations of doctors and software engineers to the West. "All sorts of people were travelling from India," she says. "I've come across a Parsi theatre troupe that toured Asia."

Food For All Seasons Beyond these were the hazier trails left by Indian ingredients and techniques in countries like Thailand (biryani like dishes called khao moag), Vietnam (curry powder, perhaps from French colonies in India is used as a seasoning for dipping sauces) or most unexpectedly of all, Japan, where curray pan (steamed and lightly friend curry stuffed buns) or danshaku (potato croquettes filled with curry) are favourite fast food options. Japanese supermarkets have Indian food sections which are larger than their sections devoted to Chinese, Thai and Korean food put together, despite their greater proximity. Not that many Indians would recognise what's on offer - the top selling ingredient, for example, is something called curry roux, thick slabs made of dried milk, fats, coconut milk and some mild spices that can be melted to form an instant curry sauce. "Japan was really the biggest surprise, because it all seems to have happened with the least influence," says Jaffrey. (Maybe that's what Netaji was doing all these years!) Food changed as the diaspora dispersed further, of course, driving them further away from India and its ingredients. Jaffrey notes how the Tamilian communities in South Africa have lost traditional breads like dosas and iddlies, while similar communities in Malaysia have retained them. The difference was simply availability of rice, which was plentiful in Southeast Asia, but not in South Africa until much later. Instead the South African Tamilians had to substitute mealies, dried corn, the local staple. Many other substitutions were made: pungent wiri-wiri chillies for milder Indian ones in Guyana, a local herb called culantro which was found to taste much like fresh coriander (also called cilantro), finely ground chapatti atta nearly always had to be substituted with much less healthy white flour (along with Western leavening agents like baking powder for Guyana's flaky paraata-roti), and the yellow split peas had to stand in for all those lost Indian dhals.

A Legume Of An Idea Yet those same dhals are an indication of constancy, she points out: no matter where they went, no matter what local legumes they had to use, the Indians of the diaspora would make some sort of dhall like dish. It could be the dalpuris of Mauritius, bread stuffed with dal, of Malaysia's dalcha, where ground nuts are added, or Durban's famous bunny-chow, a hollowed out loaf stuffed with beans meant for black African who were not allowed to eat in Indian restaurants under the strict apartheid laws or even the Indianised version of umngqusho, the traditional Xhosa maize and bean stew dish that a star-struck Jaffrey eats with Nelson Mandela. Along with dhals, the traditional tarka method of adding a seasoning of spices quickly fried in oil at the end, has remained. "Its always the same, whether its the tarka of Singapore, which is the mother of all tarkas, they add almost every ingredient, or it can be the chawnk of Guyana, so simple it must still be almost like they did it all those years back in India," says Jaffrey. Despite all the differences in how the diaspora was created and the places it went to, there were a few common factors that influenced the food. First, Jaffrey notes, was the simple fact of who was going. The long journeys also made for bonding. "Whether you were Hindu or Muslim or whatever your case, you realised that those you were sailing with were your brethren," she says. This meant that caste restrictions on what could and couldn't be eaten were often dumped. Similarly while certain communities may have dominated the ships, they were often forced into one mass by their masters who were indifferent to the differences. All South Indians who left from Madras become one, whether Tamil, Telugu or Malayali (in themselves relatively modern distinctions). This is reflected in the food, where the subtle regional distinctions of India tend to meld - "it all becomes a general spiciness," she says. A third point is particularly interesting though, especially in comparison to African slaves. For them the separation from Africa was total, there were no contacts, no merchandise obtainable from the lands of their birth. With the Indian diaspora though such contacts were possible, since people could travel back and forth if they wanted and could afford it, and most important of all, another stream of the diaspora, the Gujarati traders, came up exactly to supply the larger diaspora with products from home. This crucially meant that at least some Indian flavours and traditions could be retained in the cooking.

Beyond Borders Today, of course, the sort of changes that came from the restrictions the diaspora had to cook under need no longer take place. "They now all have wives or sometimes even maids from India to cook for them, so the food remains the same," says Jaffrey, a bit regretfully. But change can come in other ways. Sometimes its just the new ingredients as broccoli can now be added to traditional pakoras, or it can come from more and more non-Indians taking up Indian cooking, experimenting with its flavours and adapting it to their own. That's how Jaffrey thinks Indian flavours will really spread in its newest territory, the US: rather than the curry restaurant phenomenon of the UK. Reading the book, its evident how much research and passion Jaffrey has put into it. She unearthed and tried to recreate the oldest British recipes for curry and curry powder, even though the people who might have eaten them were not Indian at all. "You have to consider the British, because the diaspora really starts with them," she says. "That's why I was interested in the sort of food that planters were eating, what was being served in clubs." She's come up with inspired guesses for some of the terms she's found in the diaspora. Noting that Malaysian roti canai is simply the Kerala style flaky parottha made even larger, she suggests that 'canai' is another form of 'Chennai' which was, even then, the name by which South Indians knew the port from they set sail.

For the Record Early on in the book Jaffrey says she realised what a vast subject the cooking of the diaspora could be. For reasons of time and in deference to her publishers she curtailed herself a bit, limiting herself to the best known Indian dish of 'curry' which she defines as any Indian dish with a sauce. Since she can't resist adding kebabs, and some of the breads and salads that would accompany them, the book is a bit more complete than the title sounds. "I was going to put in desserts, but in the end left them out because of space," she says. "And I have a few pickle recipes, but really that's a world in itself." The result is that one gets the impression that there's an even larger book of diasporic cooking struggling to get out of here, to which things like pickles, sweets and snacks could be added and also the few regions she doesn't really touch on like Fiji. "But I'll leave that for someone else to do," laughs Jaffrey. Her next project she says will be a book based on her childhood. Yet one gets the feeling the diaspora will not leave her easily. The stories she came across, and some of which she reproduced in the book, have clearly moved her a great deal. "So many of their stories are so sad, just like that song about leaving Calcutta," she says. "They left everything behind, they didn't know where they were going, they were cheated so often." And so many of the memories are disappearing because there have been so few attempts to collect them, even in those communities. Like their food, both Indian and yet changed, the diaspora's story is one to be savoured, and Jaffrey has given us the most literal way of doing so.